Analysis Russian Music

Musorgsky [Mussorgsky; Moussorgsky], Modest Petrovich
Robert W. Oldani
https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.19468
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001
This version: 30 June 2020
Updated in this version

updated and revised
(b Karevo, Pskov district, March 9/21, 1839; d St Petersburg, March 16/28, 1881). Russian composer.
His life was disjointed, ending in loneliness and poverty, and at the time of his death some of his most
important compositions were left unfinished. His greatest achievements were as a composer of operas
and solo songs. Largely self-taught and highly intellectual, he discovered a way of writing for the voice
that was both lyrical and true to the inflections of speech. He was the most strikingly individual
Russian composer of the later 19th century and an avatar of modernism for the generation of Debussy
and Ravel.
1. Childhood and beginnings as a composer.
Like several other 19th-century Russian composers, Musorgsky was born in the countryside to wealth
and property. The family’s principal estate, where he spent the first ten years of his life, lay amid
forests and fields about 400 km south-south-east of St Petersburg, overlooking Lake Zhizhitsa
(formerly Zhistso). According to an autobiographical sketch written late in life, he took delight as a
toddler in the Russian folktales of his nurse and tried to capture their spirit in improvisations at the
piano before he had learnt even the most basic rules of playing. At the age of six he began music
lessons with his mother, who taught him those rules. His progress was rapid if unexceptional within his
social class: he was playing small pieces by Liszt at the age of seven and a Field concerto before an
audience of family and friends two years later. In 1849, when he was ten, his father took him and his
older brother Filaret to St Petersburg to enrol them in the Peterschule, an élite secondary school for
the sons of the gentry, where he spent the next two years. At this time too he began to study the piano
with Anton Herke, a pedagogue and performer acclaimed in St Petersburg, who was a pupil of Field,
Kalkbrenner, Moscheles, and Ries.
After a year’s further study at A.A. Komarov’s preparatory boarding school for prospective cadets,
Musorgsky entered the Cadet School of the Guards in 1852 and began to train for the career of a
military officer common among young men of his rank. According to his brother, he was particularly
interested in history while at school, and studied German philosophy as an upper classman. He
advanced rapidly in his lessons with Herke, and as a result often found himself called upon ‘to thump
out dances to please his fellow cadets in the Guards school’ (Kompaneysky, 1906). Soon after entering
the school he published at his father’s expense his first composition, the Porte-enseigne Polka. Long
thought lost, the work was rediscovered and published anew in 1947; nothing in it suggests the mature
Musorgsky. He sang in the school choir, and the religious instructor, Father Kirill Krupsky, gave him
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church music by Bortnyans′ky and still more recent composers to study. Because of legal restrictions
imposed on liturgical music after 1837, only six composers, all Russians flourishing after 1750, could
have contributed to the choir’s repertory. Thus, Musorgsky’s assertion in his autobiographical sketch
that Father Krupsky helped him acquire ‘a profound knowledge of the very essence of ancient Greek
and Catholic church music’ must be regarded as a great exaggeration; after Musorgsky’s death,
Krupsky himself confirmed that he had no such knowledge to impart.
Although Musorgsky’s formal lessons with Herke ended in 1854, he regularly attended and frequently
played at the lessons Herke gave to the daughter of the Cadet School’s director. In 1856, though he
had learnt nothing of harmony or composition, he considered writing an opera after Victor Hugo’s Han
d’Islande; nothing came of the plan because (in his own words) ‘nothing could’. Likewise in 1856 he
graduated from the Cadet School and was commissioned an officer in the Preobrazhensky Regiment,
the foremost regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard, founded by Peter the Great and traditionally led
by the tsar himself. Borodin, who met him in the autumn of 1856, described him as an elegant piano-
playing dilettante.
In the winter of 1856–7 Musorgsky was introduced to Dargomïzhsky, already an established composer,
and soon he began to appear at musical evenings in Dargomïzhsky’s home. The following autumn
Dargomïzhsky introduced him to Cui, another young military officer who dabbled in composition and
had studied briefly with Moniuszko as a teenager. Through these new acquaintances he soon met
Balakirev and Stasov, and in December he began lessons in composition with Balakirev, which
consisted of their playing and analysing (in piano duet arrangements) all Beethoven’s symphonies, plus
compositions by Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Glinka, and Dargomïzhsky, as well as some Bach,
Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. He resumed composition even before meeting Balakirev and Stasov,
completing in April 1857 a Sel′skaya pesnya (Gde tï zvyozdochka) (‘Rustic Song (Where art thou, little
star?)’), which he then orchestrated in 1858. Like the Souvenir d’enfance for piano of October 1857,
this early song is an undistinguished apprentice piece. But because Musorgsky had the habit of
backdating revisions of his work to the time of original composition, the true first version of this song
has long been wrongly known (thanks to the date of its orchestration) as the second version, and the
true second version (a minor masterpiece dating from the mid-1860s) as the first. Ironically, one of the
unintended consequences of Musorgsky’s backdating has been to perpetuate a view of him as an idiot
savant, who understood his art so poorly that he often abandoned vivid first thoughts in favour of drab
second ones, when in fact his revisions are always carefully considered.
Other apprentice works followed in 1858–9, including a drinking-song, Vesyolïy chas (‘The Joyous
Hour’), the romances Otchego, skazhi (‘Tell me why’) and List′ya shumeli unïlo (‘The leaves rustled
sadly’), and a handful of piano transcriptions from Glinka, Balakirev, and Beethoven. Musorgsky began
two piano sonatas, in E♭ major and F♯ minor, as exercises for Balakirev in 1858 and left both
unfinished. Likewise in 1858 he began to compose incidental music to Vladislav Ozerov’s play Ėdip v
Afinakh (‘Oedipus in Athens’), of which only one number has come down to us, the choral ‘Scene in the
Temple’. During the summer of 1858 he suffered a nervous or spiritual crisis – ‘mysticism mixed with
cynical thoughts about the Deity’ he writes to Balakirev – and on June 5/17 resigned his commission,
turning decisively to music. After spending several weeks in the country (during which his nervous
condition may have improved temporarily), he returned to St Petersburg in late summer and soon
resumed lessons with Balakirev. Though much of his time was devoted to studying scores – his letters
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mention Gluck’s Alceste, Iphigénie en Aulide and Armide, Hérold’s Zampa, Mozart’s Requiem, and
Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata – he nonetheless managed to complete (in November) two scherzos for
piano, in C♯ minor and B♭ major, and to orchestrate the second with Balakirev’s help.
2. Continued apprenticeship.
In the spring of 1859 Musorgsky spent a few weeks in the village of Glebovo, near Moscow, at the
estate of the Shilovskys, friends whom he had met through Dargomïzhsky. Mariya Shilovskaya had
been known in the salons of St Petersburg for her ‘dashing and somewhat gypsy-like style’ of singing
(Stasov, 1881), and after marrying a wealthy man, Stepan Shilovsky, she turned her husband’s estate
into a rural centre for music and a haven for talented young composers. In 1859 she invited Konstantin
Lyadov (then conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre and a family friend) to conduct Glinka’s A Life for the
Tsar in the estate’s private theatre, with herself in the role of Vanya. While at Glebovo, Musorgsky
helped prepare this production, made Lyadov’s acquaintance, and probably had his first glimpse of the
many practical details involved in staging an opera. There too his mental crisis may have come upon
him again, but it was quickly submerged in the excitement of his first visit to Moscow. Writing to
Balakirev from the old capital, he proclaimed a love of ‘everything Russian’ and excitedly described as
‘sacred antiquity’ the sights that then were kindling his imagination: the cathedrals and palaces of the
Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral, and Red Square. Back in St Petersburg, in October, he produced a
charming if conventional Impromptu passionné for piano, suggested by two characters in Herzen’s
novel Who is to Blame?, and the beginnings of a cantata, Marsh Shamilya (‘Shamil’s March’) for tenor
and bass, chorus, and orchestra. On January 11/23, 1860, his Scherzo in B♭ was conducted by Anton
Rubinstein at a concert in St Petersburg of the newly founded Russian Music Society; the sole review,
by Aleksandr Serov, was cordial.
That summer he spent three months at the Shilovskys’ estate, and his mental crisis worsened. He
wrote: ‘For the greater part of the time from May to August, my brain was weak and in a state of
violent irritability’. Although it is impossible to know what was wrong, hints and allusions in his
correspondence suggest a late adolescent sexual crisis, probably an infatuation or perhaps an affair
with his hostess, Mariya Shilovskaya. Whatever happened that summer, when autumn came, he
announced his recovery and his intention to put his work in order and begin a new period in his
creative life. The crisis was past in January 1861, when he spent several weeks at the Shilovskys’
mansion in Moscow. Only three new works appeared in 1860: the romance Chto vam slova lyubvi?
(‘What are words of love to you?’) and a duet arrangement of Gordigiani’s Ogni sabato avrete il lume
acceso (both dedicated to Mariya Shilovskaya), plus first and third movements of a Sonata in C major,
for piano four hands. Although the sonata’s third movement is just a rearrangement of the Scherzo in
C♯ minor (1858), its first – plainly modelled on the first movement of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major
Symphony – provides Musorgsky’s only completed exercise in sonata form, as well as the first
important indication of his exceptional gift for learning by absorbing the works of others. The sonata
was followed, early in 1861, with sketches for two movements of a Symphony in D and an ‘exercise in
instrumentation’, Alla marcia notturna. These are the last projects that can be dismissed easily as
exercises for Balakirev. Then on April 6/18, 1861, the temple scene from his Oedipus was given a
concert performance in the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, under Konstantin Lyadov. (In November
1860 Musorgsky had rejected an offer by the Russian Music Society to perform this work, probably
because of the musical politics then starting to divide St Petersburg’s musical life.)
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Having weathered his adolescent crisis, Musorgsky tried to put his relationship with the autocratic
Balakirev on a new footing, gently chiding his mentor for offering too much unwanted advice and
treating him too much like a child. According to Nikolay Kompaneysky, he began at this time ‘to study
the technique of his art on his own, after which the direction of his talent suddenly took an
independant turn’, an indication that Kompaneysky alone among his contemporaries may have noticed
something of his extraordinary ability as an autodidact. In March 1862 he conceived the first version
(for piano) of the Intermezzo in modo classico, the only important work to appear between December
1860 and August 1863. The years 1861–2 also saw the creation of exercises and transcriptions,
including a piano duet arrangement of most of Beethoven’s String Quartet op.130. Musorgsky later
characterized this period as a time in which he had ‘set his brain in order and acquired useful
knowledge’.
The emancipation of the serfs on February 19/March 3, 1861, involved him in family problems.
Throughout 1861–2 he was obliged to spend much of his time dealing with financial matters and
helping his brother Filaret manage the family estate. Like so many other members of the minor
nobility, the Musorgskys were gradually impoverished by the Great Reform, and Modest was soon
forced to accept a low-grade civil service appointment. On December 1/13, 1863, he was assigned to
the Central Engineering Authority, with the rank of collegiate secretary, and on January 20/February 1,
1864, he was appointed assistant chief of the authority’s barracks division. This period of service
lasted less than four years; on December 1/13, 1866, he was promoted to the rank of titular counsellor,
but on April 28/May 10, 1867, he was declared supernumerary and furloughed from the authority,
remaining in service but collecting no wages. Even before entering the service he had settled in St
Petersburg (autumn 1863) in conditions that, under the influence of Chernïshevsky’s recently
published novel Chto delat′? (‘What is to be done?’), had suddenly become popular among younger
Russian intellectuals: he joined a commune with five other young men, living in the same flat and
ardently cultivating and exchanging scientistic ideas on art, religion, philosophy, and politics.
According to Stasov, it was during the years of communal life that Musorgsky came under the influence
of Chernïshevsky’s views on realism in art, in particular the belief that art cannot exist for its own
sake, but must educate and uplift mankind, and reveal ‘artistic truth’. In a series of works written over
the next few years, Musorgsky vividly attempted to implement these ideas in music, and he professed
allegiance to them for the rest of his life, writing in 1880, for example, that ‘art is a means of
communicating with people, not an aim in itself’. Nevertheless, although these brave words remained a
part of his credo, his music throughout the 1870s retreated steadily from the extremes of the realistic
style.
Even before entering this ‘realistic’ phase of his career, Musorgsky had begun to produce works that
announce his impending artistic maturity. In August 1863 he composed two songs, settings in Russian
translation of Goethe’s ‘An die Türen will ich schleichen’ and Byron’s ‘Song of Saul before his Last
Battle’. Shortly before, on May 16/28, he and Stasov attended the première of Serov’s Judith, the first
important Russian opera to appear since Dargomïzhsky’s Rusalka in 1855. Even though his letters carp
at Serov’s work – the required response in view of Balakirev and Stasov’s feud with Serov – Musorgsky
plainly was excited by the opera. Not six months later, while still under its spell, he began his own
opera Salammbô, based on Flaubert’s novel of ancient Carthage. He wrote the libretto as he went
along, combining his own verses with lines from Heine and several Russian poets, and taking his stage
directions straight from Flaubert. He also incorporated earlier works into the opera, stitching the
Oedipus chorus into Act 2 and the theme of the Intermezzo in modo classico into Act 4 scene i. Though
he completed about 90 minutes of music (three big scenes and three small numbers, mostly in vocal
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score), he gradually lost interest in the subject’s exoticism and abandoned the project in the summer of
1866, after having worked intermittently on it for three years. He saved these pages, however, and
recycled many of them in later works, including the opera Boris Godunov and the tone poem Ivanova
noch′ na Lïsoy gore (‘St John’s Night on Bald Mountain’). Two short works that frame Salammbô
exhibit, in Cui’s phrase, the same ‘bold oriental colouring … entirely similar to the Assyrian music of
Mr Serov’: the Byron setting from 1863, best known under the title Tsar′ Saul (‘King Saul’) given to it in
revision, probably in 1870–71, and the chorus Porazheniye Sennakheriba (‘The Destruction of
Sennacherib’, 1866–7). At this time of his life, still living in the commune, Musorgsky also suffered his
first serious bout of alcoholism, probably induced by grief at his mother’s death in March 1865. He
recovered after his brother and sister-in-law took him into their household.
3. First maturity.
By the beginning of 1866 Musorgsky had finished 18 songs in a generally lyric vein, which he then
gathered together in the manuscript Yunïye godï (‘Years of Youth’). With one inconsequential exception,
this manuscript contains all the songs he had written by the time of its compilation: conventional
romances, a single ‘experiment in recitative’, and a few songs showing the influence of Balakirev’s
folksong settings (which had been known in the circle for several years and were soon to be
published). In this latter group are some of his best-known early songs: Kalistratushka (‘Little
Kalistrat’), Kolïbel′naya pesnya (‘Cradle Song’) and the true second version of Where art thou, little
star? In the autumn of 1866, after a summer in the country, he returned to St Petersburg with the first
of his so-called realistic songs – Gopak (‘Hopak’), Svetik Savishna (‘Darling Savishna’), Akh tï, p′yanaya
teterya! (‘You drunken sot!’), and Seminarist (‘The Seminarist’). In these songs he mined for the first
time a vein that his contemporaries were to regard as particularly rich in his creative work: musical
naturalism and ironic, realistic comedy in song. In 1867 two of his new songs, Darling Savishna and
Hopak, plus the unexceptional Tell me why of nine years earlier, were published by Johansen, the
publisher of his mentor’s folksong anthology. These were the first of his works to appear in print since
the Porte-enseigne Polka.
Freed from office work and living on his brother’s farm (Minkino, in the Luga district), he occupied
himself during the summer of 1867 with orchestral composition and the piano transcription of still
more movements of Beethoven’s quartets (from op.59 no.2, op.131, and op.135). The orchestral works
were St John’s Night on Bald Mountain, an orchestration of the Intermezzo in modo classico (now with
an added trio), and a projected symphonic poem Podibrad Cheshskïy (‘Poděbrad of Bohemia’), inspired
by Balakirev’s recent sojourn in Prague and the Pan-Slav Congress held in St Petersburg earlier in the
summer. It was in the aftermath of a concert for these Serbian, Croatian, and Bohemian guests that
Stasov coined the nickname ‘Moguchaya Kuchka’ (‘Mighty Handful’), which in time would become
synonymous with the Balakirev circle, or more narrowly, with its five leading members: Balakirev, Cui,
Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin.
Although Musorgsky may have toyed with the idea for St John’s Night on Bald Mountain as early as
1858, he probably wrote nothing down until the difficult summer of 1860, when he told Balakirev that
he then had in hand ‘some material’ for incidental music to a play entitled Ved′ma (‘The Witch’) by
Baron Georgy Mengden, one of his army comrades. In April 1866 he returned to the work, now
projected as an orchestral piece and informally dubbed ‘The Witches’ in his correspondence: he
composed the music over the next 12 months, writing out the orchestral score during 11 days of
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intense work, at Minkino, in June 1867. He took great pride in it, describing it excitedly as ‘Russian
and original, … hot and chaotic’, and almost certainly he expected Balakirev to perform it, since the
latter had been invited to conduct four concerts of the Russian Music Society in the 1867–8 season.
Instead Balakirev found fault and angered Musorgsky by demanding changes. The composer firmly
defended his work, choosing to forego performance rather than alter what he regarded as his first
large-scale independent composition. He also abandoned the projected tone poem Poděbrad of
Bohemia, of which nothing survives besides themes quoted in a letter to Rimsky-Korsakov. With
performance of his orchestral works blocked, Musorgsky returned to vocal music, completing in 1867–
8 such well-known naturalistic and mimetic songs as Po gribï (‘Gathering Mushrooms’), Ozornik (‘The
Ragamuffin’), Sirotka (‘The Orphan’), and Svetskaya skazochka (‘A Society Tale’), the last perhaps
better known under Stasov’s title Kozyol (‘The Goat’). Other songs – Klassik (‘The Classicist’, 1867),
Rayok (‘The Gallery’, 1870) – are little more than salvos in the musical polemics of the age. From this
time on, Musorgsky no longer submitted his work for Balakirev’s approval.
Back in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1867, he and the other members of the group drew closer to
Dargomïzhsky, then working on his last opera, Kamennïy gost′ (‘The Stone Guest’), a nearly verbatim
setting of Pushkin’s eponymous ‘little tragedy’. The Stone Guest came to be celebrated in Musorgsky’s
circle as exemplary of the group’s views – which had been developed primarily by Cui in his newspaper
criticism – according to which an opera must be a careful and sensitive setting, in recitative style, of a
good (and minimally altered) text, with each line receiving its own ‘characteristic’ setting and with
little reliance on closed forms or traditional musical logic. The result, opéra dialogué, emphasized
freely evolving melodic recitative at the expense of more lyrical and symmetric forms.
Taking his cue from Dargomïzhsky and Cui – but more profoundly stimulated by the mimetic theory of
word-tone relations that he had found in Georg Gervinus’s book Händel und Shakespeare – Musorgsky
began a nearly verbatim setting of Gogol’s prose comedy Zhenit′ba (‘The Marriage’) on June 11/23,
1868. By July 8/20 he had completed in vocal score a single act, corresponding to Gogol’s Act 1 scenes
i–xi (printed in some editions simply as Act 1 scene i). This much done, he reflected on his ‘experiment
in dramatic music in prose’ in a group of letters to friends. At times closely paraphrasing Gervinus’s
formulations, he expressed in these letters ideas of text setting that guided much of his subsequent
work, even after he began to attenuate the most extreme elements of his style:
Here’s what I would like. That my characters speak on stage as living people speak, but so that the
character and force of their intonation, supported by the orchestra which is the musical background
for their speech, hit the target head-on; that is, my music must be an artistic reproduction of human
speech in all its most subtle windings. (Musorgsky to Lyudmila Shestakova, July 30/August 11, 1868; A.
Rimsky-Korsakov, 1932)
The single act of The Marriage was privately performed at Cui’s on September 24/October 6, 1868,
with Musorgsky himself, a fine baritone, taking the role of the hesitant bridegroom Podkolyosin. His
colleagues were cool, admiring only the piece’s humour and a few ‘interesting declamatory moments’.
Having forged the tools with which he hoped to capture in music the authentic intonations of Russian
speech, he abandoned The Marriage in the autumn of 1868, calling it merely a preparation. He then
turned, at the suggestion of his friend Vladimir Nikolsky, to Pushkin’s drama Boris Godunov.
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4. The years of Boris.
Boris would have been an impractical subject just three years earlier. Though completed in 1825 and
first published in 1831, Pushkin’s play was not approved for performance by the tsarist censor until
1866. In October 1868, when Musorgsky began his libretto, he had reason to hope that he could
overcome the censorship obstacles still blocking an opera on this subject, and he began work eagerly.
Soon after finishing the first three scenes in vocal score, on December 21, 1868/January 2, 1869, he
was appointed assistant chief in the third section of the Forestry Department of the Ministry of State
Property, where he was destined to work until September 30/October 12, 1878; his starting salary in
this post was 450 rubles annually. He moved in with old friends, Aleksandr Opochinin and his sister
Nadezhda, and in these settled conditions work on the opera flourished. The first version of Boris, in
seven scenes, was completed in vocal score by July 18/30, 1869, and in full score on December 15/27.
Still committed to opéra dialogué, Musorgsky took his text directly from Pushkin with few changes. But
although his setting is predominantly in melodic recitative, reflecting the accentuation pattern of
spoken Russian, it avoids the most extreme characteristics of The Marriage and thus marks a first
slight step back from his most severely ‘realistic’ style. Two weeks before the completion of the full
score, he was promoted to the rank of collegiate assessor.
In the summer of 1870 Musorgsky approached Stepan Gedeonov, director of the Imperial Theatres,
about staging Boris and considered writing an opera, Bobïl′ (‘The Landless Peasant’), on a scenario
adapted by Stasov from Friedrich Spielhagen’s novella Hans und Grete. Before abandoning that idea,
he composed the music for a divination scene, which later reappeared in Khovanshchina (Act 2). In the
autumn he wrote both words and music for four studies of childhood; these, with one earlier piece in
the same vein, were published by Bessel (his principal publisher) as Detskaya (‘The Nursery’) in June
1872. Two more songs were composed shortly thereafter and first published separately, in Rimsky-
Korsakov’s edition, under the title Na dacha (‘At the Dacha’, 1882). Later editions of The Nursery
collected all seven, the most masterful as well as the last of Musorgsky’s naturalistic songs.
The long-delayed production of Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov finally took place on September 17/29,
1870, to mixed if generally unenthusiastic reviews. Not quite five months later, on February 10/22,
1871, the Mariinsky Theatre’s music committee rejected the opera by a vote of six to one, on the
grounds that it lacked an extended female role. The composer began a revision at once, ultimately
carrying it much further than the stated objections of the music committee required. Retaining five of
the scenes already composed – but with important cuts and insertions that clarify the opera’s tonal
structure and the significance of its reminiscence motives – he added the two Polish scenes and the
role of Maryna Mniszech to supply the missing prima donna. He composed the palace scene anew,
adding among much else a recitative and aria for Boris based partly on a lyric theme from Salammbô.
He replaced the scene in front of St Basil’s Cathedral with the anarchic Kromy Forest scene, putting it
after Boris’s death. In all the new scenes he was much less faithful to the letter of Pushkin’s text;
indeed, the Kromy Forest scene has no parallel in Pushkin. The net effect of so extensive a remodelling
was to elevate the work’s tone, mitigating the comedy that his contemporaries heard in the recitative
style and introducing an elemental theatricality missing in the initial opéra dialogué. Composition was
completed on December 14/26, 1871, the full orchestral score on June 23/July 5, 1872; during the latter
part of the work (from late summer 1871 onwards) Musorgsky shared rooms with Rimsky-Korsakov.
Also, early in 1872 Gedeonov invited the two fellow lodgers to collaborate with Borodin, Cui, and the
staff ballet composer Ludwig Minkus in a projected fantastic opera-ballet, Mlada. For this Musorgsky
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drew once more on his old Oedipus music and also on St John’s Night on Bald Mountain, revising the
music extensively and adding choral parts in a ‘demon language’ reminiscent of Berlioz’s La damnation
de Faust. Although Gedeonov was forced to abandon Mlada when it became clear it would be too
expensive to produce, Musorgsky was able to recycle his contribution in other works. From this period,
the first half of 1872, the Balakirev circle began to disintegrate.
On February 5/17, 1872, the coronation scene of Boris was given its première at a concert of the
Russian Music Society under Eduard Nápravník, who had been principal conductor of the Mariinsky
Theatre since 1869. Then on April 3/15 Balakirev conducted the polonaise at a concert of the Free
School of Music. Meanwhile, Musorgsky had submitted his revision to the censors. Their report of
March 7/19 recommended performance, pointing out that the only obstacle lay in the edict of Nicholas
I, dating from 1837, which forbade the operatic representation of a tsar. Over the next four weeks, this
report drifted up through the imperial bureaucracy, receiving approval along the way, and finally
reaching the tsar, who alone could set aside his predecessor’s ruling. On April 5/17 Aleksandr II
authorized the production of Boris Godunov. During the next month the Mariinsky’s music committee
re-examined the opera, which now contained a female role and had the approval of both the censor and
the tsar himself. On May 6/18 the committee almost certainly accepted Boris for performance, but
because its members had already committed themselves to two other major productions in the next
season, they did not give Musorgsky a definite date.
On February 5/17, 1873, once those prior commitments had been discharged, three scenes from Boris
were performed with great success at the benefit for Gennady Kondrat′yev, the Mariinsky’s chief stage
director. Not quite two months later the publisher Bessel announced the opening of a subscription list
for the vocal score. This first edition, issued in January 1874, in no way constitutes a ‘third version’ of
the opera; it is, rather, Musorgsky’s final refinement of the revision, a few additional small cuts having
been taken after the libretto’s publication in 1873. Finally, on January 27/February 8, 1874, Boris
Godunov was given its première at the Mariinsky, at the benefit for the soprano Yuliya Platonova.
Several cuts were taken to reduce the work’s length by about an hour; none of them, including the
omission of the entire scene in Pimen’s cell, was imposed by the censor. Although the Orthodox Church
strictly forbade the representation of clergymen on stage, Pimen was able to appear in the death scene
as a ‘hermit’, dissociated from the ordained clergy. Such a stratagem had brought the cell scene into
the play’s production in 1870 and could have brought it into the opera’s too. Nápravník, not the censor,
insisted on this and the other cuts on the grounds that the omitted sections would be ineffective on the
stage. In all, four performances of Boris were given before the arrival of Lent ended the theatre season;
each was sold out. 22 more performances were given during the period up to October 1882, often to
full (or nearly full) houses, never to less than a half-full house.
5. On to ‘Khovanshchina’ and ‘Sorochintsï Fair’.
Even as he was finishing the full score of Boris, in June 1872, Musorgsky was starting to plan
Khovanshchina (‘The Khovansky Affair’), a grand historical opera dealing with the political turmoil
attendant on Peter the Great’s full accession to the throne. With Stasov’s help, and plainly stimulated
by the celebrations marking the bicentenary of Peter’s birth, he began by compiling a ‘notebook for
Khovanshchina’: 20 pages of jottings and quotations taken from eyewitness accounts, 17th-century
documents, and later histories. But instead of finishing the libretto at the outset, he built it up as he
went along, at times incorporating documents from the ‘notebook’ almost unchanged. He finally
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prepared a clean copy of the text in 1879 or 1880, apparently to clarify his final conception of the opera
and guide himself towards completion of the work, but even this libretto is incomplete, lacking the
second half of Act 5. He could not introduce Peter or his sister, the regent Sophia, as characters
because of a censorship rule forbidding representation on stage of members of the ruling house. Thus
Sophia was depicted through her minister Golitsïn, while Peter’s offstage presence was indicated with
a regimental march of the Preobrazhensky Guards (the composer’s old unit) and his triumph was
shown through the elimination, one by one, of his opponents.
Although Musorgsky excitedly described several scenes of Khovanshchina in letters during the summer
of 1873, only two brief episodes from Act 3 were put on paper that year. In June he formed a close
friendship with Count Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a poet and distant relative, with whom he later
shared a furnished apartment. He also seems to have fallen ill, or perhaps to have started drinking
again that summer. Stasov’s brother Dmitry, hinting at a relapse, wrote to his wife that Musorgsky had
experienced ‘fits of madness’ such as he had had a few years earlier, and commented nervously on a
striking change in the composer’s appearance, ‘somewhat sunken, grown thinner’. Stasov, writing from
Europe, tried to persuade him to visit Liszt in Weimar, but he refused, citing loyalty to his supervisor in
the civil service (who had fallen ill) and the need to work on Khovanshchina. On December 1/13, 1873,
he won promotion to the rank of court counsellor.
The production and popular success of Boris Godunov, early in 1874, marked the peak of Musorgsky’s
career. Still, most critics condemned the work or, at best, misconstrued what was in it to praise. Even
Cui blended praise for certain details with unexpectedly sharp criticism, declaring the opera to be an
‘immature’ work resulting from an ‘unfastidious, self-satisfied, hasty process of composition’. Stung by
the critics’ vehemence and Cui’s betrayal, Musorgsky expressed his loneliness and isolation in the
darkly pessimistic song cycle Bez solntsa (‘Sunless’), completed in August 1874, to poems by
Golenishchev-Kutuzov. In June he also wrote the piano suite Kartinki s vïstavki (‘Pictures from an
Exhibition’), suggested by a memorial exhibition of the architectural drawings, stage designs, and
watercolours of his friend Viktor Hartmann, who had died the year before. Little was done to
Khovanshchina in 1874, although the prelude, subtitled ‘Dawn on the Moscow River’, was written down
in September of that year.
In July 1874 Musorgsky halted his work on Khovanshchina in order to consider a comic opera after
Gogol’s short story Sorochinskaya yarmarka (‘Sorochintsï Fair’). He had enjoyed the support of the
Ukrainian-born bass Osip Petrov, the most venerable singer in the Russian opera troupe, since the
latter’s performance as Varlaam in the three-scene Boris of February 1873, and chose Sorochintsï Fair
in order to create a Ukrainian role for him. But after pondering the subject for a season, Musorgsky
temporarily abandoned it early in 1875, uncertain about his ability to handle Ukrainian speech patterns
in recitative. Returning to Khovanshchina, he finished the first act in vocal score on July 30/August 11,
1875. Also during the first half of the year he wrote the first three numbers of a new song cycle to
poems of Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Pesni i plyaski smerti (‘Songs and Dances of Death’). When the poet
left for the country later that summer, and then decided to marry a few months after that, Musorgsky
was given a home by a retired naval officer, Pavel Naumov, where he lived for the next several years.
He had begun to drift away from his earlier musical friends, Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov, because of Cui’s
hostile review of Boris and Rimsky’s self-imposed immersion in technical studies, which Musorgsky
viewed suspiciously as a retreat from the ideals they once had shared. Though remaining close to
Stasov and Borodin, he formed new friendships, in the wake of Boris, with the singers, medical men,
actors, writers, and artists who frequented the Maly Yaroslavets restaurant in St Petersburg, an
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establishment characterized by Nikolay Tcherepnin as ‘the favourite place of the leading figures in
Petersburg’s world of the arts’. The effects of alcoholism had yet to show themselves, but he was
increasingly unable to resist drinking.
He made steady progress with Khovanshchina between August 1875 and August 1876, during which
time he completed, in vocal score, almost all of Act 2, the first half of Act 3, and the ‘Dance of the
Persian Maidens’ from Act 4 scene i. During the spring of 1876 he and Lyudmila Shestakova, Glinka’s
sister, were instrumental in organizing the jubilee marking Petrov’s 50th anniversary as a singer, and
Musorgsky’s activity on behalf of Petrov, whom he affectionately called ‘Grandpa’, led him back to
work on Sorochintsï Fair. By the end of June he had worked out a final revision of Night on Bald
Mountain – written down only in May 1880 – that was very like the version adapted for Mlada save for a
new ending. He now planned to insert this episode into Sorochintsï Fair as a dream sequence for one of
the characters.
Apparently he recognized the retreat from realism that his later work represented. In a letter to
Stasov, dated December 25, 1876/January 6, 1877, he contrasted the ‘folk scenes’ which he had done
before Boris with his current work, described as ‘the embodiment of recitative in melody … I would like
to call it intelligently justified melody’. The new manner may be seen in five songs to texts of Alexey
Tolstoy, composed between March 4/16 and March 21/April 2, 1877, but also in pages of Sorochintsï
Fair, Khovanshchina, the two later song cycles and even the revised Boris. Still committed to finding a
musical equivalent for the Russian language, he nevertheless turned with increasing conviction
throughout the 1870s towards greater lyricism and formal symmetry, occasionally writing vocal
melodies at variance with the spoken language’s accentuation and inflection, and using traditional
sectional forms.
In 1877 he set Khovanshchina aside in favour of Sorochintsï Fair, for which he finally drafted a scenario
in May. Later that summer he composed a substantial new scene for Act 2 and in the autumn worked
on the Act 1 scene at the fair, adapted from an earlier market scene in Mlada. In June that same year
he completed the fourth of the Songs and Dances of Death; further songs projected for this cycle and
mentioned in the poet’s papers were never written down. A short choral piece, Iisus Navin (‘Joshua’),
based on material recycled from the durable Salammbô, was completed in July. Work on Sorochintsï
Fair came to a halt after Petrov’s death on February 28/March 12, 1878 – an emotional blow which
devastated Musorgsky and from which he may never have fully recovered. On May 23/June 4, 1878 he
was promoted in rank to collegiate counsellor; although he rose no higher in his department than
senior chief, a post he had attained in March 1875, his annual salary had now risen to 1200 rubles with
occasional bonuses.
6. Final years.
The final version of Marfa’s divination (Khovanshchina, Act 2) at last was put on paper in July 1878;
little else was done with the opera for the rest of the year. Although Musorgsky apparently kept his
alcoholism in check throughout the first half of 1878, in August the craving for drink overtook him
again. Just as he was about to be fired from the Forestry Department, Stasov and Balakirev secured a
transfer for him to a temporary position in the Office of Government Control. He took up this post on
October 1/13, 1878; his new boss, the state comptroller and folksong enthusiast Tyorty Filippov,
proved extraordinarily lenient.
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In 1879 Filippov permitted him to leave for a three-month concert tour of south-central Russia,
Ukraine, and the Crimea. An old acquaintance, the contralto Darya Leonova, had invited him to make
this provincial tour as her accompanist, and between early August and late October they gave concerts
in 12 cities. Besides accompanying Leonova, who included some of his songs in her programmes, he
played as soloist several short piano pieces of his own, as well as arrangements of choral works and
scenes from his operas. While on tour he composed one of his best-known songs, Pesnya Mefistofelya v
pogrebke Auerbakha (‘Mephistopheles’s Song in Auerbach’s Cellar’), plus two brief piano pieces, both
impressions of the Crimea, which were published in the music magazine Nuvellist in 1880. The trip also
gave him the impetus he needed to resume work on Sorochintsï Fair.
On January 1/13, 1880, he was dismissed from government service, but Filippov and other friends
guaranteed him a monthly stipend of 100 rubles on condition he finish Khovanshchina. Shortly
afterwards another group of well-wishers, led by his friend from Cadet School days, the banker Fyodor
Vanlyarsky, offered him 80 rubles per month on condition he finish Sorochintsï Fair within a year, and
that he demonstrate his progress by issuing individual numbers with the publisher Bernard. Thus
pressed to finish both operas, he finished neither. The last manuscripts of Khovanshchina are dated
August 1880, by which time he had completed, in vocal score, everything but the end of Act 2 and the
Old Believers’ chorus with which the opera was to end (though he had transcribed its melody in 1874).
He had orchestrated only two short sections of the opera. Sorochintsï Fair, begun later and pursued
under worse conditions, was left in an even more fragmentary state.
During this last year of his life Musorgsky made further appearances as Leonova’s accompanist. She
also gave him a home at her summer dacha in Oranienbaum and employed him as accompanist, theory
teacher, and assistant in the singing school she had established in St Petersburg; he composed several
folksong arrangements and vocalises for the pupils there. Besides working at his two operas he
thought of writing an orchestral suite with harps and piano and, in January or February 1880, added a
trio alla turca to a processional march on a Russian folksong originally written for Mlada. This ‘new’
march, Vzyatiye Karsa (‘The Capture of Kars’), was commissioned for an event celebrating the reign of
Aleksandr II, but when the organizers dropped from sight, their ‘grand scenic presentation’ was never
mounted. Later in the year, on October 18/30, Nápravník performed the piece at a concert of the
Russian Music Society in St Petersburg.
On February 9/21, 1881, Musorgsky made his last public appearances, accompanying at concerts in the
morning and evening, the latter a benefit for needy students of the Art Academy. Two days later he
went to Leonova (according to her own account) ‘in a state of great nervous excitement’, saying ‘that
there was nothing left for him but to go and beg in the streets’. That evening he suffered a seizure. He
spent the night at Leonova’s house, sleeping in a sitting position, and the next day (February 12/24)
had three more seizures. On February 14/26 he was taken by his friends to the Nikolayevsky Military
Hospital. There was a temporary improvement in early March, during which Repin painted his famous
portrait, but on March 16/28 he died, a victim of chronic alcoholism. He was buried in the Aleksandr
Nevsky Cemetery two days later.
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7. Posthumous completion of works.
After Musorgsky’s death other musicians began to edit his music for performance, producing
ultimately a confusing number of completions, redactions, and orchestrations of various works.
Beginning with Rimsky-Korsakov, his first editors often distorted his work by altering it, appealing for
justification to a belief that had originated in his own circle and was commonly accepted in late 19th-
century Russia, namely, that Musorgsky was brilliant but inept, an amateur who disdained the
technical studies that would have enabled him to realize his ideas. Once this belief was discredited,
later editors generally avoided changing what Musorgsky wrote and confined their efforts largely to
orchestration.
The editing of the posthumous publications was mainly – at first solely – carried out by Rimsky-
Korsakov, who selflessly undertook the task and gave his editions gratis to the publisher Bessel.
Rimsky found life, talent, and originality in his friend’s music side-by-side with ‘absurd, disconnected
harmony, ugly part-writing, sometimes strikingly illogical modulation’ – in short, ‘utter technical
impotence’. Convinced of both the music’s value and the foolishness of ‘publication without a trained
hand to set it in order’, Rimsky prepared what he regarded as practical performance editions, ‘for
making [Musorgsky’s] colossal talent known, not for studying his personality and his artistic sins’.
Every composition that passed through Rimsky-Korsakov’s hands was to a greater or lesser degree
‘corrected’ by him.
He began with what all Musorgsky’s friends recognized as the most important and most necessary
task: the completion of Khovanshchina. He trimmed several episodes, filled the gaps in Acts 2 and 5
with new music, smoothed out many details of melody and harmony, and orchestrated the whole.
Finished and published in 1883, his version was decisively rejected by the Imperial Theatres that same
year and first produced by an amateur group in St Petersburg on February 9/21, 1886 (abridged, and
with changes imposed by the censorship). For Diaghilev’s 1913 Paris production Ravel and Stravinsky
orchestrated and restored a few of Rimsky’s cuts, and Stravinsky composed a new concluding chorus
for the final act, based on the Old Believers’ melody that Musorgsky had intended to use. Diaghilev
also took several drastic cuts of his own to reduce the work’s overall length, and remodelled it to
appeal to his audience’s interest, at the time, in ‘authentic’ Musorgsky, emphasizing the chorus and
inserting various details calculated to appeal to the composer’s modernist admirers. Although
Stravinsky’s new chorus was published by Bessel in 1913, the Diaghilev version did not replace
Rimsky’s score as the standard text.
Besides finishing Khovanshchina Rimsky-Korsakov also turned his attention to compositions left in
satisfactory state by Musorgsky and produced editions which for a number of years supplanted the
authentic texts. The piano suite Pictures from an Exhibition appeared in 1886 with relatively few
changes. In the case of Night on Bald Mountain, Rimsky prepared a new orchestral piece based most
closely on the version with chorus that Musorgsky had prepared for Sorochintsï Fair. The Songs and
Dances of Death appeared in 1882 in Rimsky’s edition; subsequently he and Glazunov orchestrated the
cycle. When in 1898 Belyayev reissued the seven songs originally published by Johansen 30 years
earlier, they were anonymously edited by Rimsky-Korsakov, who also prepared for Bessel in 1908 new
editions of the songs originally published by that firm, introducing the customary changes, most
blatantly in the thorough reworking (dubbed a ‘free paraphrase’) of the first number of The Nursery.
But all these publications are of minor importance compared with Rimsky’s versions of Boris Godunov.
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Rimsky began working on Boris early in 1889, when he rescored the polonaise for concert
performance. For a time he considered writing an article about the opera, its merits and faults, but he
decided that a revision of the work would be both more instructive and more useful, and in 1896 he
completed an entirely new version of the opera, which Bessel then published in both vocal and full
score. Though based on Musorgsky’s vocal score of 1874, Rimsky’s redaction introduced drastic cuts,
some new music of his own, wholesale rewriting in vocal line, harmony, rhythm, and dynamics, a
complete reorchestration, and the transposition of the order of the last two scenes. This version was
produced privately in the Great Hall of the St Petersburg Conservatory on November 28/December 10,
1896, then by the Mamontov Opera Company with Chaliapin (Moscow, December 7/19, 1898; St
Petersburg, March 7/19, 1899), and finally by the Imperial Theatres, again with Chaliapin (Moscow,
April 13/26, 1901; St Petersburg, November 9/22, 1904). Rimsky returned to Boris in 1906 in order to
restore most of the cuts he had made ten years earlier; shortly thereafter, for Diaghilev’s 1908 Paris
production, the first in western Europe, he composed two new passages for the coronation scene. This
second Rimsky score was for many years the primary text by which Boris was known.
Although Rimsky-Korsakov left Salammbô untouched, early in 1906 he decided to publish the single act
of The Marriage; the vocal score, typically toned-down, was issued by Bessel in 1908. He also began an
orchestration, but completed only a few pages before his death; the single act subsequently was
orchestrated by Aleksandr Gauk (1917) and later by several others. Rimsky-Korsakov made no attempt
to edit Sorochintsï Fair (apart from the Bald Mountain music), but on his suggestion Golenischev-
Kutuzov was asked to complete the libretto and Anatoly Lyadov the music. In 1886 Bessel published
three numbers in vocal score; three more numbers appeared in 1904, all orchestrated by Lyadov and
including a rewritten version of the prelude. This prelude and parts of Acts 1 and 2, edited by
Vyacheslav Karatïgin, were performed as illustrations at Karatïgin’s lecture on Sorochintsï Fair, given
privately in St Petersburg (March 16/29, 1911) with piano accompaniment and without chorus; these
sections were staged, with the addition of the finale of Act 2, in the Comedia Theatre, St Petersburg,
on December 17/30, 1911. Then on October 8/21, 1913, a pastiche of all the available numbers in the
Lyadov and Karatïgin editions, plus Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Night on Bald Mountain, was
produced at the Moscow Free Theatre, the lacunae in the action being filled with spoken dialogue
drawn from Gogol’s short story; the numbers edited by Karatïgin were orchestrated by Yury
Sakhnovsky, who also composed a few additional passages. In 1915 Cui prepared a complete musical
version, using all the available numbers and in some cases Lyadov’s orchestration, and composing
additional music as required, partly on Musorgsky’s themes; the vocal score of Cui’s version was
published by Bessel in 1916, and on October 13/26, 1917, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution, was
produced at the Theatre of Musical Drama, Petrograd. Another complete version was later prepared by
Nikolay Tcherepnin in Paris, incorporating music from the editions of Lyadov, Karatïgin, and Cui, and
filling the gaps with music borrowed from Salammbô, songs, and other works of Musorgsky. This
version was published by Bessel, now in Paris, and they also issued the manuscript collection Years of
Youth, which had come into the possession of Charles Malherbe, archivist of the Paris Opéra, in 1909.
Although Malherbe had permitted publication of four previously unknown songs when he acquired the
manuscript, the Bessel edition added nearly all the others (albeit in defective texts); only the duet after
Gordigiani was omitted.
About the time that Rimsky published his first edition of Boris (1896), Musorgsky’s reputation began to
grow in France, where the avant garde saw him as an innovator who had ‘trampled on the rules and
crushed the life out of them by the sheer weight of his thought’ (d’Alheim, 1896). When Diaghilev
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brought Boris to Paris, modernist critics attacked Rimsky’s editorial tampering and began to wage a
vigorous campaign for the publication and performance of Musorgsky’s music as he had written it;
others defended Rimsky’s editions and his selfless labour on behalf of his friend. At last the Russian
State Music Publishing House embarked on a collected edition of Musorgsky’s music in accordance
with his manuscripts, embodying all textual variants and provided with critical apparatus. This edition,
of which Pavel Lamm was editor-in-chief, began with the publication of Boris Godunov in 1928, but in a
problematic format. In Lamm’s score, a conflation of both versions and all sources known at the time,
neither the initial opéra dialogué nor the revision unfolds as Musorgsky left it; instead, the two are
combined to the greatest extent possible. Episodes unique to the initial version are inserted into the
alien context of the revision, and the result is an elephantine Boris in ten scenes, each at maximum
length, from which one may extract Musorgsky’s separate conceptions only by careful attention to the
vocal score’s commentary and footnotes. Working from Lamm’s score, Shostakovich prepared a fresh
orchestration of Boris in 1939–40, and in 1953 Karol Rathaus touched up Musorgsky/Lamm for a new
production at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1975 David Lloyd-Jones published a new critical edition of
Boris, based on Musorgsky’s revised holograph full score but still echoing Lamm’s blend of the two
versions in the five scenes common to both.
Lamm and Boris Asaf′yev, in 1931, published a vocal score of Khovanshchina, which assembled and
presented Musorgsky’s manuscripts as he had left them, and Asaf′yev prepared an orchestration
(which remains unpublished) faithfully embodying all the material left by Musorgsky. Sorochintsï Fair
was completed in the same spirit by Vissarion Shebalin, whose score, published in Lamm’s edition in
1933–4, has become the standard performing version. Though interrupted in 1939 before its
completion, Lamm’s edition presented most of Musorgsky’s music in authentic texts; the last
installment to appear was a volume of folksong arrangements, rough drafts, and miscellaneous
autograph materials. In 1951–2 Shostakovich orchestrated from Lamm’s vocal score a few scenes of
Khovanshchina that Rimsky-Korsakov had omitted, and those were inserted into the Kirov production
of Rimsky’s edition. Then in 1958 Shostakovich prepared a new orchestration of the rest of the opera
from Lamm. This version is now the basic text of most productions, with Stravinsky’s final chorus
offering an alternative ending more in tune with Musorgsky’s own dramatic instincts. Other
orchestrations deriving from Lamm include Zoltán Peskó’s Salammbô (1980), Gennady
Rozhdestvensky’s Marriage (1982), Shostakovich’s Songs and Dances of Death (1962), and Yevgeny
Svetlanov’s Sunless (1968). At least a dozen orchestrations of Pictures from an Exhibition have been
made; the earliest is by Mikhail Tushmalov (?1891), the best known by Ravel (1922). A new Polnoye
akademicheskoye sobraniye sochineniy M.P. Musorgskogo v 34-kh tomakh (‘The Complete Academic
Collection of the Works of M.P. Musorgsky in 34 Volumes’), initially projected to start in 1989, to mark
the sesquicentennial of Musorgsky’s birth, finally began to appear in 1996.
8. Music.
Musorgsky’s career falls into four periods: childhood and adolescence (1839–58), apprenticeship
(1858–66), maturity (1866–76), and last years (1877–81). The traditional view, postulating a marked
declined after the production of Boris in January 1874, is contradicted by the composition after that
date of Pictures from an Exhibition, most of Khovanshchina, the final version of Night on Bald
Mountain (for Sorochintsï Fair), and the song cycles Sunless and Songs and Dances of Death. Poverty
and alcoholism surely contributed to Musorgsky’s failure to put on paper all that he had composed, but
Page 14 of 33

despite his lonely and disordered bachelor’s life, despite the hours he was forced to waste in the
Forestry Department to eke out a living, he continued to grow as an artist up until his death. Indeed,
the words that he once applied to Verdi describe his own career equally well: ‘This one pushes ahead
on a grand scale, this innovator doesn’t feel shy … outdistancing everything, outdistancing everyone,
even himself’.
His earliest compositions were conventional romances, songs, and salon piano pieces, the work of a
talented gentleman enthusiast. He acquired basic technique in his lessons with Balakirev by analysing
and imitating European and Russian masterworks. The Schubert source for the first movement of the
Sonata in C (1860), for example, is shown in how triplets pervade the first theme and the ensuing
transition, how the second theme appears in E minor and the exposition closes in G, and how in
recapitulation the second theme returns in A minor. But side by side with these gestures taken from
Schubert, the sonata contains a harmonic mannerism that is typically Musorgskian and that reappears
in many later works: juxtaposed tritones having colouristic or structural significance. (The climax of
the development is reached on F♯, whereupon retransition is effected immediately and abruptly
through a striking chromatic progression, which is used again, more deftly, 14 years later in the third
song of Sunless, F♯ simultaneously sliding down to F♮ and up to G♮, the F♯ triad progressing to a
dominant 7th and so to C.) Despite its shortwindedness and immaturity, the sonata thus reveals an
important pattern that helps define Musorgsky’s craft: study and assimilation of the music of a peer
(whether Russian or western European), then redeployment of the lessons learnt – technical,
declamatory, dramaturgical – in combination with personal elements. In the words of Carl Dahlhaus
(1985), ‘Musorgsky was a self-taught composer, but he was also undoubtedly an intellectual one’.
Musorgsky’s growth during his apprenticeship was shaped by ideas of verisimilitude in art, by his
experience of opera (both native and foreign), and by his absorption of the folk style through
Balakirev’s collection of Russian folksongs. His interest in the realistic portrayal of incidents from life
first bore fruit in the almost scientifically precise character studies of the late 1860s; such songs as
Darling Savishna, The Seminarist, The Orphan, and A Society Tale reveal a strong talent for
dispassionate observation and keen characterization of specific human types. Musorgsky never fully
lost this early interest in verisimilitude, but he became ‘more flexible and subtle about the areas where
it might apply’ (Emerson, 1988) and more amenable to established musical techniques and procedures.
His subsequent penchant for a quiet curtain is foretold in the enthusiasm he had for the end of Act 1 of
Serov’s Judith (1863): ‘pianissimo … a kind of solemn hush which is left unfinished … very beautiful’.
Characteristics of the protyazhnaya, or melismatic folksong, appear in the true second version of
Where art thou, little star?, beginning with the melismas that decorate the voice part at the beginning
and elsewhere. The melodic phrases of a protyazhnaya in minor mode normally cadence either on the
tonic or subtonic, a characteristic known as mutability (peremennost′). Since the subtonic of the minor
(e.g. E♮ in F♯ minor) is also the dominant of the relative major, harmonic settings of such melodies
move easily between the minor and relative major, a detail that gives a characteristic colouration to
much Russian music ‘in folk style’, whether Musorgsky’s or anyone else’s. Where art thou, little star?,
Duyut vetrï, vetrï buynïye (‘The winds blow, the wild winds’), Little Kalistrat, Cradle Song, and the
‘Song of the Parrot’ from Boris Godunov all exhibit this trait.
In his maturity Musorgsky’s musicianship was more broadly based than scholars traditionally have
maintained, and his technical mastery was derived not just from folk music, Glinka, and Dargomïzhsky,
but from the major Romantic masters of Europe as well. Indeed, as Wiley observed (1982), it is
‘precisely within the realm of opera that Glinka and Dargomïzhsky … perform least satisfactorily their
Page 15 of 33

roles as teacher to the later generations’. They provided devices – Wiley lists orchestral combinations,
fragments of melody, techniques of text setting, harmonic audacities – but lessons in theatricality came
from Verdi, Meyerbeer, and Wagner. In both the theatre and his workroom Musorgsky must surely have
noticed how adept his European contemporaries were at placing, highlighting, and recalling
reminiscence themes. With equal skill he recalls the melody by which Marfa had prophesied Golitsïn’s
exile (Khovanshchina, Act 2) when the prophecy is fulfilled (Act 4 scene ii), and he took other lessons in
dramaturgy from his European contemporaries as well. The revision of ‘Dostig ya vysshey vlasti’, the
tsar’s monologue from Act 2 of Boris, unfolds as a recitative and aria: Boris first relates circumstances
and events in a relatively free-flowing parlando, then expresses emotion in lyrical cantilena. The
monologue resembles King Philip’s aria ‘Ella giammi m’amò’ from Don Carlo, an opera heard in Italian
in St Petersburg in 1869 and admired, albeit grudgingly, even by Cui. Both arias begin with recitative-
like writing that nonetheless is surprisingly melodic for recitative, and both conclude with music that is
both memorably melodious and formally symmetric. Furthermore, each of these scenes is followed by a
scene of confrontation with a sinister character from which the ruler emerges defeated, Philip by the
Grand Inquisitor, Boris by Shuisky. Nor did Musorgsky draw lessons in composition only from opera:
the St Basil’s scene, from the first version of Boris (1869), begins with a short orchestral prelude which
borrows both gesture and orchestration from a passage of Liszt’s ‘Procession by Night’, the first of his
Two Episodes from Lenau’s ‘Faust’, a work admired in Musorgsky’s circle and very likely known to him
soon after its composition. Stimulation by the great Romantic masters was a crucial factor in
Musorgsky’s development, much more so than a narrow ‘nationalist’ view of this composer would
permit us to believe.
One of the guiding principles of Musorgsky’s mature style was, to be sure, his quest to find a musical
equivalent for the patterns, inflections, pace, and cadence of spoken Russian, to fix in music the
paralexical aspects of speech that give it plasticity and nuance. This quest, arising from exposure to
the scientistic thought of the 1860s in Russia, was at its most intense when he was studying Gervinus,
composing The Marriage, and absorbed with speech so keenly that he could write to Rimsky-Korsakov,
in the wake of this work: ‘No matter who is speaking (nor what he says) my mind is already working to
find the musical statement for such speech’. The type of recitative he developed in this way has several
style traits that are recognized as Musorgskian: placing the accented syllables on metrically strong
beats, reinforcing the metric accent with both tonic and agogic accent, setting unaccented syllables to
strings of short equal notes after the beat, never permitting an unaccented syllable to fall on even a
weak beat (thereby avoiding secondary accent, alien to Russian), avoiding melismas, and relying on
note values – neither very long nor very short – that mimic the pace of speech. In his subsequent works
– Boris, Khovanshchina, the late cycles – he combines this naturalistic declamation with a keen
understanding of the essentially musical elements of music drama and song: periodic melody, aria and
ensemble, reminiscence music as a dramatic device, tonal structure. Though it is misleading to ignore
his passion for the Russian language and the care with which he shaped and set words, it is equally
misleading to characterize him as a composer interested in declamation and little else.
In the large-scale works of his maturity and last years, tonality often functions as an opposition of
colours. In Boris, for example, opposing characters or ideas receive their musical expression in
opposing tonalities, with the work’s dramatic conflicts reflected in the underlying contrast. The song
cycle Sunless is organized in the same way. F♯ emerges as the cycle’s tonic in the fifth song, and the
work’s final despairing text (no.6, ‘On the River’) dies away, open-endedly, on the dominant of F♯.
Throughout Sunless no more than a fleeting glimpse of hope appears; it is expressed (no.3, ‘The
Page 16 of 33

useless noisy day is ended’) in C major, a tritone away from F♯. Modal melodies occur in many of
Musorgsky’s works, at times suggesting folksong and national traditions and at times running counter
to them. In the revised Boris, Kseniya’s lament (Act 2) is in the Dorian mode, characterized by
Balakirev as ‘the Russian minor’. The third act of Khovanshchina begins with an Old Believers’ chorus
which invokes the Mixolydian mode, even though this mode is uncharacteristic of Russian church
chant. In Pictures from an Exhibition Phrygian inflections appear in the central section of ‘The Great
Gate of Kiev’, which Musorgsky based on the church chant ‘As you are Baptized in Christ’, and the
main melody of ‘The Old Castle’ is Aeolian. ‘The Old Castle’ also illustrates Musorgsky’s use of pedal,
another persistent characteristic. A pedal point appears, for example, in the trio of the Scherzo in C♯
minor (1858), and other instances of the device occur in Salammbô (the ‘Chorus of Priestesses’), Boris
Godunov (the closing measures of the revised palace scene and the beginning of the love duet), Songs
and Dances of Death (‘Serenade’), Sunless (‘Within Four Walls’ and ‘On the River’), and Khovanshchina
(end of Act 1, ‘Marfa’s divination’, ‘Dance of the Persian Maidens’). Like other 19th-century Russian
composers, Musorgsky also drew on the whole-tone set (notably in the 1867 version of Night on Bald
Mountain) and the octatonic set (most famously in the ‘Boris chords’ of the coronation scene, but also
in Tsar′ Saul, Sunless, and elsewhere). The octatonic set also helps account for the many tritone
relations that appear throughout his music.
Musorgsky’s last years saw him moving away from the limiting positions staked out by the dogmatists
of his circle, Cui and Stasov, towards fully professional participation in Russia’s musical life. He
associated with professional performing musicians – among them Leonova and Petrov – and began to
plan works with specific artists in mind. He showed remarkably little interest in the third historical
opera, Pugachevshchina (‘The Pugachev Affair’), that Stasov was pressing him to write. In Sorochintsï
Fair he even began to use folksong and folklike melody in place of realist recitative, even though the
practice directly countered the preachment of his circle.
The image of him as an illiterate, if brilliant, dilettante is now long out of date. He was a highly
intellectual composer, who forged a unique personal style from the elements around him: Glinka,
Dargomïzhsky, and folksong, to be sure, but Berlioz, Liszt, Serov, Verdi, and Wagner as well. Long
known for mimetic text setting, profound respect for the Russian language, and technical procedures
that are both unconventional and bluntly direct, he also demonstrated a profound grasp of musical
structure and the associative use of tonality. Though his influence on Russian composers in his lifetime
was minuscule, ‘in the 20th century his bluff anti-conventional stance and remarkable powers of
psychological penetration have made him a protomodernist icon’ (Taruskin, The New Grove Dictionary
of Opera, 1992), profoundly influential on Debussy, Ravel, Janáček, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. To
borrow words Stravinsky applied to himself, Musorgsky related ‘only from an angle to the German
stem’. But no less than Stravinsky, he constructed his works meticulously and in them strove to join the
highest ranks of European masters.
Works
works published in St Petersburg unless otherwise stated
Editions
Page 17 of 33

M.P. Musorgskiy: polnoye sobraniye sochineniy [Complete Collection of Works], ed. P.
Lamm with B. Asaf′yev (Moscow, 1928–39/R) [L]
Polnoye akademicheskoye sobraniye sochineniy M.P. Musorgskogo [Complete

Academic Collection of Works] (Moscow, 1996–) [ASM]
Stage
Edip v Afinakh [Oedipus in Athens] (incid music, V. Ozerov), 1858–61, inc., L vi/1; ‘Scene in the
Temple’, chorus, orch, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1883)
Salammbô (op, after G. Flaubert), 1863–6, inc., L iv/1; orchd Z. Peskó, Milan, RAI, Nov 10, 1980
‘Chorus of Priestesses’, chorus, orch, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1884)
‘Salammbô’s Prayer’, vs, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)
‘Song of the Balearic Islander’ (Paris, 1923)
Zhenit′ba [The Marriage] (comic op, N. Gogol), Act 1 only in vs, 1868 (1908), L iv/2; private perf.,
St Petersburg, Sept 24/Oct 6, 1868, staged, St Petersburg, Suvorin Theatre School, March 19/April
1, 1909
Boris Godunov (op, Musorgsky, after A.S. Pushkin and N.M. Karamzin)
1st version, 7 scenes, 1868–9, Leningrad, Feb 16, 1928
2nd version, prol and 4 acts, 1871–2, vs (1874), St Petersburg, Mariinsky, Jan 27/Feb 8, 1874
both versions, conflated, in L i and ed. D. Lloyd-Jones (London, 1975), 1st version, not conflated,
in ASM; ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, St Petersburg, Conservatory, Nov 28/Dec 10, 1896 (1896), rev.,
Paris, May 19, 1908 (1908)
ed. D. Shostakovich, Leningrad, Kirov, Nov 4, 1959 (Moscow, 1963)
Bobïl′ [The Landless Peasant] (op, after F. Spielhagen: Hans und Grete), projected 1870
Mlada (opera-ballet, V.A. Krïlov), collab. Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Cui, Minkus, 1872, inc., L iv/3
Khovanshchina (op, 5, Musorgsky), 1872–80, L ii, vii/2; completed and orchd Rimsky-Korsakov
(1883), St Petersburg, Musical Dramatic Circle, Kononov Hall, Feb 9/21, 1886
Page 18 of 33

arr. Stravinsky and Ravel, Paris, Champs-Elysées, June 5, 1913, final chorus by Stravinsky (1914)
completed and orchd Shostakovich, Leningrad, Kirov, Nov 25, 1960 (Moscow, 1963)
Sorochinskaya yarmarka [Sorochintsï Fair] (comic op, after Gogol), 1874–80
completed and orchd A. Lyadov, V.G. Karatïgin and others, Moscow, Free Theatre, Oct 8/21, 1913
completed and orchd Cui, Petrograd, Theatre of Musical Drama, Oct 13/26, 1917
arr. N. Tcherepnin, Monte Carlo, Opéra, March 27, 1923, vs (Paris, 1924)
completed and orchd V. Shebalin, Moscow, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Jan 12, 1932, L iii
Choral
Marsh Shamilya [Shamil′’s March] (Arabic, transcribed in Russ.), T, B, chorus, pf, 1859, unpubd
Porazheniye Sennakheriba [The Destruction of Sennacherib] (Byron, trans. A.K. Tolstoy, freely
reworked Musorgsky), 1866–7 (1871), rev. 1874, L vi/2
Iisus Navin [Joshua] (Bible: Joshua, freely reworked Musorgsky), A, B, chorus, pf, 1874–7, ed. N.
Rimsky-Korsakov (1883), L vi/3
Three vocalises, 3 female vv, 1880, L v/10
Five Russian folksongs, arr. 4 male vv, 1880, L v/10: Skazhi, devitsa milaya; Tï vzoydi, solntse
krasnoye; U vorot, vorot batyshkinïkh; Uzh tï, volya, moya volya, with 2 solo T; Plïvet, vosplïvayet
zelyonïy dubok, inc.
Angel vopiyashe [An Angel Clamouring], doubtful; ed. Ye. Levashov, SovM (1981), no.3
Orchestral
Scherzo, B♭, 1858, orig. for pf, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1883), L vii/4
Alla marcia notturna, 1861
Ivanova noch′ na Lïsoy gore [St John’s Night on Bald Mountain], 1866–7, ed. G. Kirkor (Moscow,
1968)
Page 19 of 33

rev. with chorus in Mlada, 1872, further rev. in Sorochintsï Fair, 1880, ed. Rimsky-Korsakov
without chorus (1886)
Intermezzo in modo classico, 1867, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1883), see PIANO [trio new], L vii/5
Vzyatiye Karsa [The Capture of Kars], march, 1880, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1883), L vii/1
Piano
in L viii unless otherwise stated
Porte-enseigne Polka, 1852 (1852), in SovM (1947), no.2
Souvenir d’enfance, 1857, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)
Scherzo, c♯, 1858, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)
Scherzo, B♭, 1858, orchd
Impromptu passionné, 1859, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)
Ein Kinderscherz, 1859, rev. 1860 (1873)
Sonata, C, 4 hands, 1860, Allegro and Scherzo [from Scherzo, c♯] only
Intermezzo in modo classico, 1862, orchd 1867, rearr. pf, 1867 (1873)
Iz vospominaniy detstva [From Memories of Childhood], 1865, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)
1 Nyanya i ya [Nurse and I], 2 Pervoye nakazaniye: Nyanya zapirayet menya v temnuyu komnatu
[First Punishment: Nurse Shuts me in a Dark Room]
Duma [Rêverie], on a theme of V.A. Loginov, 1865, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)
La capricieuse, on a theme of L. Heyden, 1865
Shveya [The Seamstress], scherzino, 1871 (1872)
Kartinki s vïstavki [Pictures from an Exhibition], 1874, L viii/2, ed. Rimsky-Korsakov (1886)
Na yuzhnom beregu Krïma [On the Southern Shore of the Crimea], 1879 (1880)
Bliz yuzhnogo berega Krïma [Near the Southern Shore of the Crimea], 1880 (1880)
Page 20 of 33

Méditation, albumleaf, 1880 (1880)
Une larme, 1880 (Moscow, 1880s)
Au village (Quasi fantasia), ?1880 (1882)
Arr. of Fair Scene and Hopak from Sorochintsï Fair
Songs
for 1 voice and piano; in L v unless otherwise stated
Sel′skaya pesnya (Gde tï, zvezdochka?) [Rustic Song (Where art thou, little star?)] (N. Grekov),
1857, orchd 1858, rev. 1863–6, ed. (Paris, 1909)
Meines Herzens Sehnsucht, 1858, ed. (Kiev, 1907)
Otchego, skazhi [Tell me why], 1858, rev. 1863–6 (1867)
Vesyolïy chas [The Joyous Hour] (A. Kol′tsov), 1858–9, rev. 1863–6, ed. (Paris, 1923)
List′ya shumeli unïlo [The leaves rustled sadly] (A.N. Pleshcheyev), 1859, rev. 1863–6, ed. (Paris,
1909)
Chto vam slova lyubvi? [What are words of love to you?] (A. Ammosov), 1860, rev. 1863–6, ed.
(Paris, 1923)
Mnogo yest′ u menya teremov i sadov [I have many palaces and gardens] (Kol′tsov), 1863, ed.
(Paris, 1923)
Pesn′ startsa: stanu skromno u poroga [Old Man’s Song] (J.W. von Goethe, trans. ?Musorgsky),
1863, ed. (Paris, 1909)
Tsar′ Saul [King Saul] (Lord Byron, trans. P. Kozlov), 1863, rev. 1866–71 (1871)
No yesli bï s toboyu ya vstretit′sya mogla [But if I could meet thee again] (V. Kurochkin), 1863, ed.
(Paris, 1923)
Duyut vetrï, vetrï buynïye [The winds blow, the wild winds] (Kol′tsov), 1864, ed. (Paris, 1909)
Kalistratushka [Little Kalistrat] (N.A. Nekrasov), 1864, rev. as Kalistrat, ?after 1866, ed. N. Rimsky-
Korsakov (1883)
Page 21 of 33

Noch′ [Night] (after Pushkin), 1864, orchd 1868, rev. 1868–71 (1871), L vii/3
Molitva [Prayer] (M.Yu. Lermontov), 1865, ed. (Paris, 1923)
Otverzhennaya: opït rechitativa [The Outcast: Essay in Recitative] (I. Holz-Miller), 1865, ed. (Paris,
1923)
Kolïbel′naya pesnya [Cradle Song] (from A.N. Ostrovsky: Voyevoda), 1865, rev. as Spi, uspi
krest′yanskiy sïn [Sleep, sleep, peasant son], 1867–71 (1871)
Malyutka: akh, zachem tvoy glazki poroyu? [Dear one, why are thine eyes sometimes so cold?]
(Pleshcheyev), 1866, ed. (Paris, 1923)
Zhelaniye [Longing] (H. Heine, trans. L.A. Mey), 1866, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)
Iz slyoz moikh [From my tears] (Heine, trans. M. Mikhaylov), 1866
Svetik Savishna [Darling Savishna] (Musorgsky), 1866 (1867)
Akh tï, p′yanaya teterya! [You drunken sot!] (Musorgsky), 1866, ed. A. Rimsky-Korsakov (Moscow,
1926)
Seminarist [The Seminarist] (Musorgsky), 1866, rev. 1866–70 (1870)
Gopak [Hopak] (Shevchenko, trans. Mey), 1866 (1867), rev. with orch, 1868, L vii/6
Pesn′ Yaremï ‘Na Dnepre’ [Yarema’s Song ‘On the Dnieper’] (Shevchenko, trans. Mey), 1866, lost,
rev. as Na Dnepre, 1879, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1888)
Yevreyskaya pesnya [Hebrew Song] (Mey), 1867 (1868)
Strekotun′ya beloboka [The Magpie] (Pushkin), 1867 (1871)
Po gribï [Gathering Mushrooms] (Mey), 1867 (1868)
Pirushka [The Feast] (Kol′tsov), 1867 (1868)
Ozornik [The Ragamuffin] (Musorgsky), 1867 (1871)
Svetskaya skazochka: kozyol [A Society Tale: The Goat] (Musorgsky), 1867 (1868)
Klassik [The Classicist] (Musorgsky), 1867 (1870)
Po nad Donom sad tsvetyot [A garden blooms by the Don] (Kol′tsov), 1867, ed. N. Rimsky-
Korsakov (1883)
Page 22 of 33

Sirotka [The Orphan] (Musorgsky), 1868 (1871)
Kolïbel′naya Eryomushki [Eremushka’s Lullaby] (Nekrasov), 1868 (1871)
Detskaya pesenka [Child’s Song] (Mey), 1868 (1871)
Detskaya [The Nursery] (Musorgsky) (1872)
1 S nyaney [With Nurse], 1868
2 V uglu [In the Corner], 1870
3 Zhuk [The Beetle], 1870
4 S kukloy [With the Doll], 1870
5 Na son gryadushchiy [Going to Sleep], 1870
6 Kot Matros [The Cat Sailor], 1872
7 Poyekhal na palochke [On the Hobbyhorse], 1872 [6 and 7 first pubd separately as Na dache
[At the Dacha], ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1882)]
Rayok [The Gallery] (Musorgsky), 1870 (1871)
Vechernyaya pesenka [Evening Song] (Pleshcheyev), 1871, ed. V. Karatïgin (1912)
Bez solntsa [Sunless] (A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov), 1874 (1874)
1 V chetïryokh stenakh [Within Four Walls]; 2 Menya tï v tolpe ne uznala [You did not know me in
the crowd]; 3 Okonchen prazdnïy, shumnïy den′ [The useless, noisy day is ended]; 4 Skuchay [Be
Bored]; 5 Elegiya [Elegy]; 6 Nad rekoy [On the River]
Zabïtïy [Forgotten] (Golenishchev-Kutuzov), 1874 (1874)
Nadgrabnoye pis′mo [Epitaph] (Musorgsky), 1874, inc., completed V. Karatïgin (1912)
Krapivnaya gora [The Nettle Mountain] (Musorgsky), 1874, inc.
Page 23 of 33

Pesni i plyaski smerti [Songs and Dances of Death] (Golenishchev-Kutuzov), ed. Rimsky-
Korsakov (1882)
1 Kolïbel′naya [Lullaby], 1875
2 Serenada [Serenade], 1875
3 Trepak, 1875
4 Polkovodets [The Field-Marshal], 1877
Neponyatnaya [The Misunderstood One] (Musorgsky), 1875, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)
Ne bozhim gromom udarilo [Not like thunder, trouble struck] (A.K. Tolstoy), 1877, ed. N. Rimsky-
Korsakov (1882)
Gornimi tikho letela dusha nebesami [Softly the spirit flew up to heaven] (A.K. Tolstoy), 1877, ed.
N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1882)
Spes′ [Pride] (A.K. Tolstoy), 1877
Oy, chest′ li to molodtsu len pryasti? [Is spinning man’s work?] (A.K. Tolstoy), 1877
Rassevayetsya, rasstupayetsya [It scatters and breaks] (A.K. Tolstoy), 1877, ed. N. Rimsky-
Korsakov (1882)
Videniye [The Vision] (Golenishchev-Kutuzov), 1877, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1882)
Strannik [The Wanderer] (F. Rückert, trans. Pleshcheyev), 1878, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1883)
Pesnya Mefistofelya v pogrebke Auerbakha [Mephistopheles’s Song in Auerbach’s Cellar] (Goethe,

trans. A. Strugovshchikov), 1879, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1883)
Bibliography
Letters, documents, memoirs

L. Shestakova: ‘Moi vechera’ [My evenings], EIT 1893–4, 2nd suppl., 119–40
N. Kompaneysky: ‘K novïm beregam: M.P. Musorgskiy (1839–1881)’ [Towards new shores],

RMG (1906), no.11, cols.265–76; no.12, cols.299–303; nos.14–15, cols.355–71; no.16, cols.398–
403; no.17, cols.432–9; no.18, cols.461–7
Page 24 of 33

N. Rimsky-Korsakov: Letopis′ moyey muzïkal′noy zhizni (St Petersburg, 1909; 9/1982; Eng.
trans., 1942 as My Musical Life)
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N.A. Rimskom-Korsakove’ [On the reasons for the editing of Musorgsky’s works: from my
recollections of N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov], Muzïka (1913), no.135, pp.441–3
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Muzïkal′noye nasledstvo [Musical heritage], ed. M.V. Ivanov-Boretsky, 1 (Moscow, 1935), 13–49
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Golenishchev-Kutuzov] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1939)
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1881); repr. in Izbrannïye stat′i [Selected essays], ed. I Gusin (Leningrad, 1952), 286–96
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works], ed. E.D. Stasova and others (Moscow, 1952), ii, 161–213; repr. in Stat′i o muzïke [Essays
on music], ed. V. Protopopov (Moscow, 1977), iii, 51–112; Eng. trans. in R. Hoops: V.V. Stasov:
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Florida State U., 1977)
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MS (1917), nos.5–6 [Musorgsky issue]
Page 25 of 33

The Chesterian, no.27 (1922) [Musorgsky issue]
I. Glebov [B. Asaf′yev]: ‘M.P. Musorgskiy, 1839–1881: opït pereotsenki znacheniya yego
tvorchestva’ [A reassessment of the significance of his creative work], Simfonicheskiye ėtyudï
(Petrograd, 1922, 2/1970), 194–221
I. Glebov [B. Asaf′yev]: Musorgskiy: opït kharakteristiki [An experiment in characterization]

(Petrograd, 1923)
O. von Riesemann: Modest Petrowitsch Mussorgski (Munich, 1926; Eng. trans., 1929 as
Moussorgsky)
Yu. Keldïsh and V. Yakovlev, eds.: M.P. Musorgskiy k pyatidesyatiletiyu so dnya smerti, 1881–
1931: stat′i i materialïy [On the 50th anniversary of Musorgsky’s death, 1881–1931: essays and
materials] (Moscow, 1932)
SovM (1939), no.4 [Musorgsky issue]
G. Orlov: Letopis′ zhizni i tvorchestva M.P. Musorgskogo [Chronicle of Musorgsky’s life and
work] (Moscow and Leningrad, 1940)
M.D. Calvocoressi: Mussorgsky (London, 1946, rev. 2/1974)
B.V. Asaf′yev: Izbrannïye trudï [Selected works], ed. T. Livanova and others (Moscow, 1954), iii,
19–168 [nine essays on Musorgsky]
M.D. Calvocoressi: Modest Mussorgsky: his Life and Works (London, 1956)
SovM (1959), no.3 [incl. special section]
A. Orlova: Trudï i dni M.P. Musorgskogo: letopis′ zhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow, 1963; Eng. trans.,
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A. Ogolevets: Vokal′naya dramaturgiya Musorgskogo [Musorgsky’s vocal dramaturgy] (Moscow,

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G. Khubov: Musorgskiy (Moscow, 1969)
A. Burmistrov: ‘Novïye faktï iz biografii Musorgskogo’ [New facts from Musorgsky’s biography],
SovM (1971), no.10, pp.114–16
R. Shirinian: Evolyutsiya opernogo tvorchestva Musorgskogo [The evolution of Musorgsky’s

operatic works] (Moscow, 1973)
A. Orlova: Musorgskiy v Peterburge [Musorgsky in St Petersburg] (Leningrad, 1974)
S. Shlifshteyn: Musorgskiy: khudozhnik, vremya, sud′ba [Musorgsky: artist, times, fate]

(Moscow, 1975)
E. Reilly: The Music of Mussorgsky: a Guide to the Editions (New York, 1980)
E. Frid: M.P. Musorgskiy: problemï tvorchestva [Problems of his works] (Leningrad, 1981)
Page 26 of 33

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Arbor, 1981)
SovM (1981), no.3 [incl. special section]
R. Taruskin: Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s (Ann Arbor,
1981)
M. Brown, ed.: Musorgsky: In Memoriam, 1881–1981 (Ann Arbor, 1982)
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no.4, pp.83–8
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G. Nekrasova: ‘Ob odnom tvorcheskom printsipe Musorgskogo’ [On a certain creative principle
of Musorgsky’s], SovM (1988), no.3, pp.67–72
Ye. Levashov, ed.: Naslediye M.P. Musorgskogo: sbornik materialov k vïpusku polnogo
akademicheskogo sobraniya sochineniy M.P. Musorgskogo [Musorgsky’s legacy: a collection of
materials on the publication of the complete academic collection of Musorgsky’s works]
(Moscow, 1989) [incl. census of MSS and bibliography of Russ. pubns]
N. Novikov: U istokov velikoy muzïki: poiski i nakhodki na rodine M.P. Musorgskogo [At the
source of great music: quest and discovery at Musorgsky’s birthplace] (Leningrad, 1989)
SovM (1989), no.3 [Musorgsky issue]
G. Golovinsky, ed.: M.P. Musorgskiy i muzïka XX veka [Musorgsky and 20th-century music]
(Moscow, 1990)
MAn, 9/1 (1990) [Musorgsky issue]
L. Kearney: Linguistic and Musical Structure in Musorgsky’s Vocal Music (diss., Yale U., 1992)
R. Taruskin: Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton, NJ, 1992)
Page 27 of 33

E. Trembovel′sky: M.P. Musorgskiy: printsipï ladovogo razvitiya [Principles of harmonic
development] (Voronezh, 1992)
MAk (1993), no.1 [incl. special section]
M. Russ: ‘Modeste Musorgsky and Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov,’ The Maynooth International

Musicological Conference 1995, Selected Proceedings: Part Two, ed. P.F. Devine and H. White
(Portland, OR, 1996), 241–50
Ye. Trembovel’skiy: Stil' Musorgskogo: Lad, garmoniya, sklad [Musorgsky’s style: mode,
harmony, coherence] (Moscow, 1999)
D. Brown: Musorgsky: his Life and Works (Oxford, 2002)
A. Vasil’eva: Neizvestnïe stranitsï zhizni Musorgskogo [Unknown pages from Musorgsky’s life]
(Pskov, 2003)
M. Papp: ‘Umerenno or Andantino molto: on Musorgsky’s Tempo Markings’, Essays in Honor of

László Somfai on his 70th Birthday, ed. L. Vikárius and V. Lampert (Lanham, MD, 2005), 287–300
S. Fedyakin: Musorgsky (Moscow, 2009)
S. Walsh: Musorgsky and his Circle: a Russian Musical Adventure (New York, 2013)
Stage works
Boris Godunov
R. Newmarch: ‘Russian Opera in Paris: Moussorgsky’s Boris’, MMR, 38 (1908), 147–9
R. Godet: En marge de ‘Boris Godounof’ (Paris and London, 1926)
V. Belaiev: Musorgsky’s ‘Boris Godunov’ and its New Version (London, 1928)
I. Glebov [B.V. Asaf′yev]: K. vosstanovleniyu ‘Borisa Godunova’ Musorgskogo [On the restoration
of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov] (Moscow, 1928)
W. Schmid: ‘Boris Godounov Again’, The Chesterian, no.72 (1928), 245–51
V. Belyayev and others: Musorgskiy: ‘Boris Godunov’: stat′i i issledovaniya [Essays and studies]
(Moscow, 1930)
A. Veprik: Ocherki po voprosam orkestrovïkh stiley [Essays on questions of orchestral style]

(Moscow, 1961, rev. 2/1978) [incl. ‘Tri orkestrovïye redaktsii pervoy kartinï prologa operï
Musorgskogo Boris Godunov’ [Three orchestrations of the first scene of the prologue of
Musorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov], 75–125]
G. Abraham: Slavonic and Romantic Music (London, 1968) [incl. ‘Mussorgsky’s Boris and
Pushkin’s’, 178–87, and ‘The Mediterranean Element in Boris Godunov’, 188–94]
D. Lloyd-Jones: Critical Commentary to M. Musorgsky: Boris Godunov: Opera in Four Acts with a
Prologue (London, 1975), 2, 7–79
Page 28 of 33

R. Oldani: ‘Boris Godunov and the Censor’, 19CM, 2 (1978–9), 245–53
M. Schandert: Das Problem der originalen Instrumentation des ‘Boris Godunow’ von M.P.
Mussorgski (Hamburg, 1979)
M. Le Roux: Moussorgski ‘Boris Godounov’ (Paris, 1980)
N. John, ed.: Boris Godunov (London, 1982) [ENO Opera Guide]
R. Taruskin: ‘Musorgsky vs. Musorgsky: the Versions of Boris Godunov’, 19CM, 8 (1984–5), 91–
118, 245–72
C. Emerson: Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington, IN, 1986)
R. Oldani: ‘Mussorgsky’s Boris on the Stage of the Maryinsky Theater: a Chronicle of the First
Production’, OQ, 4/2 (1986), 75–92
C. Emerson: ‘Musorgsky’s Libretti on Historical Themes: from the Two Borises to

Khovanshchina’, Reading Opera, ed. A. Groos and R. Parker (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 235–64
C. Emerson and R. Oldani: Modest Musorgsky and ‘Boris Godunov’: Myths, Realities,
Reconsiderations (Cambridge, 1994)
Ye. Levashov and N. Teterina: ‘V redaktsii Rimskogo-Korsakova’ [In Rimsky- Korsakov’s edition],
MAk (1994), no.2, pp.64–74 [on Rimsky’s Boris]
M. Kalil: Reports from Offstage: Representations of Slavic History in Russian and Czech Opera
(diss., Princeton U., 2002) [chap.1: ‘Telling History in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov’, 21–76]
M. Quayle: Orchestration as Interpretation in Three Orchestrations of Musorgsky’s ‘Boris

Godunov’ (diss., New York U., 2009)
R. Taruskin: ‘Crowd, Mob, and Nation in Boris Godunov: What did Musorgsky Think, and Does it
Matter?’, JM, 28/2 (2011), 143–65
J. Forshaw: Dangerous Tenors, Heroic Basses, and Non-Ingénues: Singers and the Envoicing of
Social Values in Russian Opera, 1836–1905 (diss., Columbia U., 2014)
E. Frey: ‘Boris Godunov and the Terrorist’, JAMS, 70/1 (2017), 129–69
Khovanshchina
S. Lopashev and others: Musorgskiy i yego ‘Khovanshchina’: sbornik statey [Musorgsky and his
Khovanshchina: a collection of essays] (Moscow, 1928)
V. Gurevich: ‘Shostakovich: redaktor Khovanshchinï’ [Shostakovich as editor of Khovanshchina],

Muzïka i sovremennost′ [Music and the present day], vii (Moscow, 1971), 29–68
V. Gurevich: ‘Shostakovich v rabote nad Khovanshchinoy’ [Shostakovich at work on

Khovanshchina], Voprosï teorii i ėstetkiki muzïki [Questions in music theory and aesthetics], ed.
L. Raaben, 11 (Leningrad, 1972), 84–108
Page 29 of 33

E. Frid: Proshedsheye, nastoyashcheye, i budushcheye v ‘Khovanshchine’ Musorgskogo [Past,
present and future in Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina] (Leningrad, 1974)
G. Bakaeva: ‘Khovanshchina’ M. Musorgskogo (Kiev, 1976)
R. Threlfall: ‘The Stravinsky Version of Khovanshchina’, SMA, 15 (1981), 106–15
R. Wiley: ‘The Tribulations of Nationalist Composers: a Speculation concerning Borrowed Music

in Khovanshchina’, Musorgsky: In Memoriam, 1881–1981, ed. M. Brown (Ann Arbor, 1982), 163–
77
R. Threlfall: ‘Stravinsky, Khovanshchina and Ravel: a Postscript’, SMA, 17 (1983), 112–14
M. Rakhmanova: ‘K 100-letiyu prem′yerï Khovanshchinï’ [On the 100th anniversary of the

première of Khovanshchina], SovM (1986), no.3, 88–96
J. Batchelor and N. John, eds.: Khovanshchina (London, 1994) [ENO opera guide]
B. Gasparov: Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture (New Haven, CT,
2005 [chap. 4: ‘Khovanshchina: a Musical Drama, Russian Style (Wagner and Musorgsky)’, 95–
131; chap.7: ‘“Popolo di Pekino”: Musorgsky’s Muscovy in Early Twentieth-Century Europe’,
185–208]
Other stage works

G. Abraham: On Russian Music (London, 1939) [incl. ‘The Fair of Sorochintsy and Cherepnin’s
Completion of it’, 216–24]
N. Shumskaya: ‘Sorochinskaya yarmarka’ M.P. Musorgskogo [Musorgsky’s Sorochintsï Fair]

(Moscow, 2/1970)
Z. Peskó: ‘Storicità – Esperienza – Creatività: sui problemi della revisione e dell’orchestrazione

di Salammbô’, Fonit Cetra LMA 3006 (1981) [disc notes]
C. Pitt: ‘Salammbô’, Opera, 37 (August 1986), 938–9
Z. Peskó and M. Papp: ‘The Reconstruction of Mussorgsky’s Fragmentary Salammbô:

Conversation with Zoltán Peskó’, The New Hungarian Quarterly, 30 (1989), 209–16
M. Rakhmanova and M. Yermolayev: ‘Novaya zhizn′ Salambo’ [New life for Salammbô], SovM
(1989), no.9, pp.88–91 [on performances of the orchestration by V. Shebalin and V. Nagovitsïn]
M. Maintz: ‘Orient als Unterhaltung? Zu Modest Petrowitsch Mussorgskis Opernfragment

Salambo’, Flauberts ‘Salammbô’ in Musik, Malerei, Literatur, und Film, ed. K. Ley (Tübingen,
1998), 153–62
L. Miller: ‘K istorii operï M. P. Musorgskogo Salambo’ [On the history of M. P. Musorgsky’s opera
Salammbô], Musicus (2008), no. 3, pp. 34–8, and no. 4, pp. 27–44
Choral, orchestral, and piano works

A. Frankenstein: ‘Victor Hartmann and Modeste Musorgsky’, MQ, 25 (1939), 268–91
Page 30 of 33

M. Pekelis: ‘Neizvestnoye proizvedeniye Musorgskogo’ [An unknown work of Musorgsky], SovM
(1947), no.2, pp.43–50 [republishes the Porte-enseigne Polka]
G. Kirkor: Preface to M. Musorgsky: Noch′ na lïsoy gore (Moscow, 1968), 3–5; Eng. trans., rev. R.
Oldani, as preface to St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain: Composer’s Original Version, 1867
(Miami, 1984), 2–6
E. Frid: Critical commentary to M. Musorgsky: Kartinki s vïstavki; faksimile [Pictures from an

exhibition; facsimile] (Moscow, 1975, 2/1982)
J. Klein: Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’: a Comparative Analysis of Several

Orchestrations (diss., Stanford U., 1980)
Ye. Levashov: ‘Neizvestnoye sochineniye’ [An unknown work], SovM (1981), no.3, pp.111–12 [on
the conjectural choral work Angel vopiyashe]
E. Garden: ‘Three Nights on Bald Mountain’, MT, 129/1745 (1988), 333–5
M. Russ: Musorgsky: ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge,

1992)
E. Tarasti: ‘A Semiotic Analysis of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition’, Sbornik statey k 70-

letiyu prof. Yu.M. Lotmana [A collection of essays for the 70th birthday of Prof. Yu.M. Lotman]
(Tartu, 1992), 19–53
S. Perry: ‘Rummaging through the “Catacombs”: Clues in Musorgsky’s Pitch Notations’, MAn,
14 (1995), 221–55
J. Sheveloff: ‘A Masterpiece from an Inhibition: Quashing the “Inquisitive Savage”’, Nineteenth-

Century Piano Music: Essays in Performance and Analysis, ed. D. Witten (New York, 1997), 275–
305
S. Perry: ‘Musorgsky’s “Gnomus”: Composer’s Score as Analytical Text’, Context: a Journal of

Music Research, no.15–16 (1998), 5–20
Songs
V. Fédorov: ‘Sur un manuscrit de Moussorgskii: les différentes éditions de ses lieder’, RdM, 13
(1932), 10–23
Yu. Keldïsh: Romansovaya lirika Musorgskogo [Musorgsky’s lyrical songs] (Moscow, 1933)
V.A. Vasina-Grossman: Russkiy klassicheskiy romans XIX veka [The Russian classical song of the
19th century] (Moscow, 1956) [incl. ‘Vokal′noye tvorchestvo Musorgskogo’ [Musorgsky’s vocal
works], 174–213]
V. Yakovlev: ‘K istorii “Rayka” i “Klassika”’ [On the history of ‘The Gallery’ and ‘The Classicist’],
SovM (1967), no.6, pp.103–7
V. Agawu: ‘Pitch Organizational Procedures in Mussorgsky’s Nursery’, Indiana Theory Review, 5

(1981), 23–59
Page 31 of 33

J. Walker: ‘Mussorgsky’s Sunless Cycle in Russian Criticism: Focus of Controversy’, MQ, 67
(1981), 382–91
P. Weber-Bockholdt: Die Lieder Mussorgskijs: Herkunft und Erscheinungsform (Munich, 1982)
C. Emerson: ‘Real Endings and Russian Death: Musorgskij’s Pesni i pljaski smerti’, Russian
Language Journal, 38 (1984), 199–216
J. Linford: A Stylistic Analysis of Musorgsky’s ‘Iunye gody’ (diss., Arizona State U., 1988)
R. Oldani: ‘The Fruit of a Purely Intellectual Invention? Boris Redivivus in Without Sun’, Slavic
and East European Arts, 8 (1993), 48–64
M. Russ: ‘“Be Bored”: Reading a Mussorgsky Song’, 19CM, 20 (1996–7), 27–45
A. Klimovitsky: Igor Stravinskiy: Instrumentovki: ‘Pesn’ o blokhe’ M. Musorgskogo, ‘Pesn’ o

blokhe’ L. Betkhovena [Igor Stravinsky: instrumentations, M. Musorgsky’s ‘Song of the Flea’, L.
Beethoven’s ‘Song of the Flea’] (St Petersburg, 2003)
S. Perry: ‘A Voice Unknown: Undercurrents in Mussorgsky’s Sunless’, 19CM, 28 (2004–5), 15–49
R. Oldani: ‘Of Devils and Fleas: a Speculation Concerning Musorgsky’s “Song of Mephistopheles
in Auerbach’s Cellar”’, Word, Music, History: a Festschrift for Caryl Emerson, ed. L. Fleishman
and others (Stanford, 2005), 2:504–18
See also
Borodin, Aleksandr Porfir′yevich, §1: Early life
Calvocoressi, Michel-Dimitri
Debussy, Claude, §7: Models and influences
Rimsky-Korsakov: (1) Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, §3: 1881–93
Lamm, Pavel Aleksandrovich
Keyboard music, §III, 5: Piano music from c1750: 19th-century national trends
Ravel, Maurice, §4: Artistic preoccupations
Nationalism, §9: The other Empire
Bell (i), §7: The use and representation of bells in art music
More on this topic

Musorgsky, Modest Petrovich (opera) <http://oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/
gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-5000903312> in Oxford Music
Online <http://oxfordmusiconline.com>
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Analysis Russian Music

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Musorgsky [Mussorgsky; Moussorgsky], Modest Petrovich

Updated in this version

1. Childhood and beginnings as a composer.

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5. On to ‘Khovanshchina’ and ‘Sorochintsï Fair’.

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works published in St Petersburg unless otherwise stated

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Polnoye akademicheskoye sobraniye sochineniy M.P. Musorgskogo [Complete

‘Chorus of Priestesses’, chorus, orch, ed. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (1884)

‘Salammbô’s Prayer’, vs, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

‘Song of the Balearic Islander’ (Paris, 1923)

1st version, 7 scenes, 1868–9, Leningrad, Feb 16, 1928

ed. D. Shostakovich, Leningrad, Kirov, Nov 4, 1959 (Moscow, 1963)

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Sorochinskaya yarmarka [Sorochintsï Fair] (comic op, after Gogol), 1874–80

Three vocalises, 3 female vv, 1880, L v/10

Alla marcia notturna, 1861

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Porte-enseigne Polka, 1852 (1852), in SovM (1947), no.2

Souvenir d’enfance, 1857, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

Scherzo, c♯, 1858, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

Scherzo, B♭, 1858, orchd

Impromptu passionné, 1859, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

Ein Kinderscherz, 1859, rev. 1860 (1873)

Iz vospominaniy detstva [From Memories of Childhood], 1865, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

Duma [Rêverie], on a theme of V.A. Loginov, 1865, ed. V. Karatïgin (1911)

La capricieuse, on a theme of L. Heyden, 1865

Shveya [The Seamstress], scherzino, 1871 (1872)

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Une larme, 1880 (Moscow, 1880s)

Au village (Quasi fantasia), ?1880 (1882)

Arr. of Fair Scene and Hopak from Sorochintsï Fair

Meines Herzens Sehnsucht, 1858, ed. (Kiev, 1907)

Otchego, skazhi [Tell me why], 1858, rev. 1863–6 (1867)

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Molitva [Prayer] (M.Yu. Lermontov), 1865, ed. (Paris, 1923)

Iz slyoz moikh [From my tears] (Heine, trans. M. Mikhaylov), 1866

Svetik Savishna [Darling Savishna] (Musorgsky), 1866 (1867)

Seminarist [The Seminarist] (Musorgsky), 1866, rev. 1866–70 (1870)

Yevreyskaya pesnya [Hebrew Song] (Mey), 1867 (1868)

Strekotun′ya beloboka [The Magpie] (Pushkin), 1867 (1871)

Po gribï [Gathering Mushrooms] (Mey), 1867 (1868)

Pirushka [The Feast] (Kol′tsov), 1867 (1868)